Connecting the Dots conference website

Stanford experts from a range of disciplines discuss the interconnections and interactions among humanity's needs for and use of water, food, energy, and environment. Drawing on their own research, the speakers illustrate and evaluate some of the ways in which decisions in one resource area can lead to trade-offs or co-benefits in others. Participants examine sustainable freshwater resources and uses in Africa, Asia, and the arid West. 

Panel: Africa - Water, Nutrition, Health and Poverty

China: Water, Food, Climate, and Policy

The Cost of Inaction (COI) is an approach to the economic evaluation of interventions that draws attention to the consequences of a failure to take an action. It is not the cost of doing nothing but the cost of not doing some particular thing and it highlights the negative impacts that result when an appropriate action is not taken.

While working as research coordinator at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health, Nadejda Marques was responsible for researching and analyzing the cost of inaction of public programs and actions that help reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on children in Angola from 2009 to 2011. Nadejda will present the results for Angola and contrast these with the results for Rwanda.

Currently, Nadejda Marques manages the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development and The Rule of Law at Stanford University.

About the topic: What could queueing theory, the science of customer flows and delays in service systems, possibly offer towards understanding and countering terrorism? In terror queue models, newly hatched terror plots correspond to newly arriving customers, the number of ongoing terror plots corresponds to the queue of customers waiting to receive service, undercover agents or informants correspond to service providers, customer service is initiated when a terror plot is detected, and service is completed when the plot is interdicted. Not all plots are interdicted; successful terror attacks correspond to customers who abandon the queue without receiving service! Building upon these ideas, we will focus our attention upon a simple observation: other things being equal, the number of ongoing terror plots increases with the duration of time from plot initiation until execution or interdiction (whichever comes first), yet no estimate of the probability distribution governing terror plot duration has appeared in the open literature. Starting with a review of US terrorism-related indictments, lower and upper bounds for the initiation date of 30 distinct Jihadi plots were identified in addition to the date of arrest or an attempted/actual terror act. Accounting for the censoring and truncation effects inherent with these data; the estimated mean duration equals 9 months, while 95% of all plots are estimated to fall between 1 and 25 months. These estimates suggest that in the United States, on average approximately three ongoing Jihadi terror plots have been active at any point in time since 9/11/2001.

About the Speaker: Edward H. Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Engineering at Yale University’s School of Management who is currently on sabbatical as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The author of more than 125 research articles, Kaplan received both the Lanchester Prize and the Edelman Award, two top honors in the operations research field, among many other awards. An elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies, Kaplan’s current research focuses on the application of operations research to problems in counterterrorism and homeland security. 

In this session of the Shorenstein APARC Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellows Research Presentations, the following will be presented:

Minoru Aosaki, "Banking System and Sovereign Risk in Japan"

After the financial crisis of 2008, European financial markets have experienced sharp increases of sovereign risk. This adversely affected the solvency of banking institutions as they suffered losses from their sovereign holdings and deterioration in their funding conditions. Meanwhile, Japan's sovereign market remained stable, but market participants were cautious as the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is the highest in the world, and its banking sector holds as much as 44% of domestic sovereign debt. The question is how Japanese policy makers should address the sovereign risk in the banking system. In pursuit of this question, Aosaki compares the market environment in Japan and the Euro Area, examining the reasons banks hold sovereign bonds and the channels that connect sovereign risk with the banking system.

Prashant Pandya, "Cell-based Therapies -- Current Trends and Future Prospects"

Stem cells have been the subject of considerable excitement and debate over the last decade. Stem cell therapy is emerging as a potentially revolutionary new way to treat disease and injury, with wide-ranging medical benefits. Stem cell research provides the opportunity to advance our understanding of human biology and treatment of various diseases. In Pandya’s research, he shares his experience about major challenges related to the commercial development of stem cell therapies and key technology drivers. This research is based on consultations with several prestigious regulatory agencies—including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, and Therapeutic Goods Administration of Australia—as well as interviews with 45 CEOs and senior scientists of large and small biotech companies and professors from leading universities across five countries. Pandya’s research reveals that there are many intriguing aspects of stem cells still remaining to be elucidated. Stem cells have the potential to treat an enormous range of diseases and conditions that plague millions of people and offer exciting promise for future therapies. But significant technical hurdles remain that will only be overcome through years of intensive research, and successful commercialization of cell-based therapies requires more than proving safety and efficacy to regulators. Ultimately the therapy must be commercially viable.

Ramnath Ramanathan, "Designing Toxicology Studies for Small Interfering Ribo Nucleic Acid"

The field of medicine has improved drastically over the period of time. Medical treatment has evolved from using plant extracts to chemical drugs to stem cell and gene therapies. Discovery of small interfering Ribo Nucleic Acid (siRNA) was one of the most important recent breakthroughs in the field of medicine. This was due to siRNA’s capability of posttranscriptional gene silencing by destruction of mRNA and thereby reducing the protein synthesis. Though the efficacy studies conducted in vitro and in animal models are promising, there have also been circumstances where there were adverse effects including mortality of animals treated with siRNA. Since RNA interference is a relatively new technique, it is very important to understand the toxicity involved before using it as a therapy. For this purpose, toxicology studies have to be designed in order to address all questions on the safety aspects of siRNA. In addition to the traditional toxicity studies, several other tests will have to be conducted. These additional studies will have to address issues specific to siRNA therapy such as immune activation, formation of tetraplex DNA, down regulation of non-target mRNA, interaction with cellular proteins, etc. Through Ramanathan’s work, he has designed a battery of toxicology studies to understand the side effects so that only relatively safe therapy is tried on humans during clinical trials. Ramanathan will present his findings.

On May 18-19, the Program on Poverty and Governance will host a two-day conference on the provision of public goods and good governance throughout the world. This conference, co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, will bring together an interdisciplinary group of economists, political scientists, policymakers, and public health researchers examining these questions. Public goods—goods and services such as education, healthcare, sanitation, potable water, and other benefits provided by the government—are intrinsically tied to issues of governance, which we broadly define as the exercise of political authority and the use of institutional resources to manage society’s problems and affairs. More specifically, factors such how political leaders get elected, the way in which government projects get funded, whether the community participates in decision-making, and the extent to which the distribution of government benefits is done through clientelistic networks, among others, play an important role in the quality and coverage of public goods that governments provide. Additionally, a critical question in large parts of the developing world relates to the role of international players and foreign aid in the provision of public goods –does external provision of public goods enable or hinder governmental capacity to deliver public services in poor communities? Through two days of presentations and panel discussions, the conference will explore how various facets of governance affect the provision of public goods and services throughout the world.

The conference will be held in Encina Hall at Stanford University May 18th and 19th, 2012. Guests are encouraged to RSVP by May 16th. Any questions may be addressed to the Program on Poverty and Governance program associate Elena Cryst.

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